BUtterfield 8 (7 page)

B. C. D. E. F. G. H. Think of all the people in this city, the money the telephone company must make. All those people, all with their problems. B. Buckley. Brown. Brown with an e on the end. Barnes. Barnard. Brace. Butterfield. Brunner! Gloria knew someone named Brunner. Dr. Reddington found the number and gave it to the operator.

He heard the signal of the number being rung, and then the practiced voice: “What number did you call, please? . . . I’m sorry, sir, that telephone has been dis-con-nec-ted.”

He replaced the transmitter. This was a hunch. He looked up the address and memorized it, and went downstairs and took a taxi to the address. He told the driver to wait at the corner of Hudson Street and the driver gave him a good look and said he would.

Dr. Reddington walked down the street, following a girl with a large package under her arm. Any other time she might have interested him, but not today. She was just the back of a girl with a good figure, from what he could see, carrying a bundle. Then to his dismay she turned in at the number he sought, and he had to walk on without stopping; and he thought of the taxi driver, who would be looking at him and wondering why he had passed the number. All confused he turned around and went back to the taxi and they left the neighborhood and drove back to the hotel in the sunshine.

 • • • 

“This is terribly nice of you,” said Gloria.

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Miss Day.

“Thanks a lot, Norma,” said Eddie Brunner.

“Oh, I don’t mind a bit. I know how it is,” said Miss Day. “You’d roast in that mink coat today.”

“Eddie, you look out the window a minute,” said Gloria.

“Oh! You really did need these,” said Miss Day when Gloria took off her coat. “I’m glad I had them. Usually on Sunday my extra things are at the cleaners’. I didn’t think to bring a slip.”

“I won’t need one with this skirt. This is a marvelous suit. Where did you get it?”

“Russek’s. Were you playing strip poker?”

“It looks that way, doesn’t it? Yes, I was, in a way. That is, we were shooting crap and I was ’way ahead at one time and then my luck changed, and when I offered to bet my dress the men took me up and of course I didn’t think they’d hold me to it and it wasn’t the men that held me to it, it was the girls on the party. Fine friends I have. It made me very angry and I left.”

“Are you going to school in New York?”

“No, I live here, but I couldn’t go home looking like this. My family—they won’t even allow me to smoke. All right, Eddie.”

“Looks better on you than it does on me,” said Norma.

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Eddie.

“I wouldn’t either,” said Gloria, “but Eddie never says anything to make me get conceited. We’ve known each other such a long time.”

“Eddie, I thought you went on the wagon after Friday,” said Norma.

“I did.”

“Oh, that. That’s mine,” said Gloria. “I bought it for Eddie because I wanted to get in his good graces. You see I thought I was going to have to spend the day here and I was going to bribe Eddie to go uptown to one of the Broadway shops, I think there are some open on Sunday night, they always seem to be open. But then he suggested you, and I think you’re perfectly darling to do this. I’ll hang this up in one of your closets, Eddie, and call for it tomorrow. I’ve been intending to put it in storage but I keep putting it off and putting it off—”

“I know,” said Miss Day.

“—and then last night I was glad I hadn’t, because a cousin of mine that goes to Yale, he and a friend arrived in an open car and it was cold. No top. They were frozen, but they insisted on driving out to a house party near Princeton.”

“Oh. Weren’t your family worried? You didn’t go home then?”

“The car broke down on the way back at some ungodly hour this morning. Bob, my cousin’s friend, took us to a party when we got back to town and that’s where I got in the crap game.”

“But what about your cousin? I should think—”

“Passed out cold, and he’s not much help anyway. Not that he’d let them make me give up my dress, but he can’t drink. None of our family can. I had two drinks of that Scotch and I’m reeling. I suppose you noticed it.”

“Oh, no. But I can never tell with other people till they start doing perfectly terrible things,” said Miss Day.

“Well, I feel grand. I feel like giving a party. By the way, before I forget it, if you give me your address I’ll have these things cleaned and send them to you.”

“All right,” said Miss Day, and gave her address.

“Let’s go to the Brevoort, but my treat.”

“I thought you lost all your money,” said Miss Day.

“I did, but I cashed a check on the way downtown. A man that works for my uncle cashed it for me. Shall we go?”

 • • • 

The nose of the Packard convertible went now up, now down. The car behaved like an army tank on a road that ordinarily was used only by trucks. Paul Farley, driving, was chewing on his lower lip, and the man beside him, looking quite pleased with himself and the world at large, was holding his chin up and dropping the ashes of his cigar on the floor of Farley’s car.

“Let’s stop,” said the man. “Just take one more look. See how it looks from here.”

Farley stopped, none too pleased, and looked around. It did please him to look at the nearly finished house; it was his work. “Looks pretty swell to me,” he said.

“I think so,” said Percy Kahan. He was just learning to say things like “I think so” when he meant “You’re damn right.” People like Farley, you never knew when they were going to say something simple, like “You’re damn right,” or something sophisticated, restrained, like “I think so.” But it was better to err on the side of the restrained than the enthusiastic. Besides, he was the buyer; Farley was still working for him as architect, and it didn’t do to let Farley think he was doing too well.

“A swell job. I know when I’ve done a swell job, and I’ve done one for you, Mr. Kahan. About the game room, my original estimate won’t cover that now. I could have done it earlier in the game, but I don’t suppose you’re going to quibble over at the most twelve hundred dollars now. You understand what I meant about the game room itself. That could be done for a great deal less, and still can, but if you want it to be in keeping with the rest of the house my best advice is, don’t try to save on the little things. I was one of the first architects to go in for game rooms, that is to recognize them as an important feature of the modern home. Up to that time a game room—well, I suppose you’ve seen enough of them to know what most of them were like. Extra space in the cellar, so they put in a portable bar, ping-pong table, a few posters from the French Line—”

“Oh, I want those. Can you get them?”

“I think so. I never like to ask them for anything, because I have my private opinion of the whole French Line crowd, but that’s a mere detail. Anyway, what I want to point out is that I was one of the first to see what an important adjunct to the home a game room can be. I’d like to show you some things I’ve done out in the Manhasset section. The Whitney neighborhood, you know.”

“Oh, did you do the Jock Whitney estate too?”

“No, I didn’t do that, but in that section I’ve—two years ago I had eleven thousand dollars to spend on one game room out that way.”

“But that was two years ago,” said Mr. Kahan. “Whose house was that?”

“Weh-hell, I, uh, it isn’t exactly ethical to give names and figures, Mr. Kahan. You understand that. Anyway, you see my point about not trying to chisel a few dollars in such an important feature of the home. For instance, you’ll want a large open fireplace, you said. Well, that’s going to cost you money now. You see, not to be too technical about it, we’ve gone ahead without making any provision for fireplaces on that side of the house, the side where it would have to be if you wanted it in the game room. And, you have the right idea about it. There
should be
an open fireplace there.

“You see, Mr. Kahan, I want this house to be right. I’ll be frank with you. A lot of us architects just can’t take it, and a lot of fellows I know are pretty darn pessimistic about the future. Naturally we’ve been hit pretty hard, some of us, but I personally can’t complain. So far this year I’ve done well over a half a million dollars’ worth of business—”

“Net?”

“Oh, no. Not net. I’m a residence architect, Mr. Kahan. But that stacks up pretty well beside what I’ve been doing the last three years. I had my best year oddly enough last year, Mr. Kahan.”

“No kidding.”

“Oh, yes. I had a lot of work in Palm Beach. And so far this year I’ve had a very good, a very satisfactory year. But next year, I’m a little afraid of next year. Not because people haven’t got the money, but because they’re afraid to spend it. There’s an awful lot of hoarding going on. I know a man who is turning everything he can into gold. Gold notes when he can’t get the actual bullion. Well, that isn’t so good. The general spirit of alarm and unrest, and next year being a Presidential year, but I’ve got my overhead, I’ve got my expenses, Presidential year or no Presidential year. So far I haven’t had to lay off a single draftsman and I don’t want to have to do it, but great heavens, if people are going to take their money out of industry and let it lie gathering dust in safe deposit vaults, or in secret vaults in their own homes, the general effect is going to be pretty bad.

“Now with a house like this, people will see this house and they can’t help being enchanted with it, and it’s been my experience that a house like yours, Mr. Kahan, with a page or two of photographs in
Town and Country
and
Country Life
and
Spur
, people who might be tempted to hoard their money—”

“You mean pictures of this house in
Town and Country
?”

“Naturally,” said Farley. “You don’t suppose I’d let this house go without—unless you’d rather not. Of course if you’d—”

“Oh, no. Not me. I’m in favor of that. Don’t tell Mrs. Kahan, though. It’d make a nice surprise for her.”

“Certainly. Women like that. And women are mighty important in these things. As I was saying, I’m counting on people seeing this house, and your friends and neighbors coming in—that’s one reason why I’d like to see you have a good game room, when you entertain informally, people will see what a really fine house you have, and they’ll want to know who did the house. It’s good business for me to do a good job for you any time, Mr. Kahan, but especially now.”

“
Town and Country
, eh? Do I send in the pictures or do you?”

“Oh, they’ll send for them. They call up and find out my plans in advance, you know, and I tell them what houses I’m doing, or at least my secretary does—it’s all routine. I suppose I’ve had more houses chosen for photographing in those magazines than any architect within ten years of my age. Shall we go back to the club? I imagine the ladies are wondering what’s happened.”

“Okay, but now listen, Mr. Farley, I don’t want you paying for dinner again. Remember last time we were out here I said next time would be my treat?”

“Huh, huh, huh,” Farley chuckled. “I’m afraid I cheated, then. I have to sign. Some other time in town I’ll hook you for a really big dinner, and I might as well warn you in advance, Mrs. Farley knows wines. I don’t know a damn thing about them, but she does.”

They drove to the club, where the ladies were waiting; Mrs. Farley fingering her wedding ring and engagement ring and guard in a way she had when she was nervous, Mrs. Kahan painlessly pinching the lobe of her left ear, a thing she did when she was nervous.

“Well,” said the four, in unison.

Farley asked the others if they would like cocktails, and they all said they would, and he took Kahan to the locker-room to wash his hands and to supervise the mixing of the drinks. As they were coming in the locker-room a man was on his way out, in such a hurry that he bumped Kahan. “Oh, I beg your pardon, sir,” said the man.

“Oh, that’s all right, Mr. Liggett,” said Kahan.

“Oh—oh, how are you,” said Liggett. “Glad to see you.”

“You don’t know who I am,” said Kahan, “but we were classmates at New Haven.”

“Oh, of course.”

“Kahan is my name.”

“Yes, I remember. Hello, Farley.”

“Hello, Liggett, you join us in a cocktail?”

“No, thanks. I’ve got a whole family waiting in the car. Well, nice to have seen you, Kann. ’By, Farley.” He shook hands and hurried away.

“He didn’t know me, but I knew him right away.”

“I didn’t know you went to Yale,” said Farley.

“I know. I never talk about it,” said Kahan. “Then once in a while I see somebody like Liggett, one of the big Skull and Bones fellows he was, and one day I met old Doctor Hadley on the street and I introduced myself to him. I can’t help it. I think what a waste of time, four years at that place, me a little Heeb from Hartford, but last November I had to be in Hollywood when the Yale-Harvard game was played, and God damn it if I don’t have a special wire with the play by play. The radio wasn’t good enough for me. I had to have the play by play. Yes, I’m a Yale man.”

“Well, I can see why you didn’t want me to see the ending first. I never would have stayed in the theater if I’d seen that ending. And you wanted to see that again? God, I hope if you ever write anything it won’t be like that.”

“I hope if I ever write anything it affects somebody the way this affected you,” said Jimmy.

“I suppose you think that’s good. I mean good writing,” said Isabel. “Where shall we go?”

“Are you hungry?”

“No, but I’d like a drink. One cocktail. Is that understood?”

“Always. Always one cocktail. That’s always understood. I know a place I’d like to take you to, but I’m a little afraid to.”

“Why, is it tough?”

“It isn’t really tough. I mean it doesn’t look tough, and the people—well, you don’t think you’re in the Racquet Club, but unless you know where you are, I mean unless you’re tipped off about what the place has, what its distinction is, it’s just another speakeasy, and right now if I told you what its distinguishing characteristic is, you wouldn’t want to go there.”

“Well, then let’s not go there,” she said. “What is peculiar about the place?”

“It’s where the Chicago mob hangs out in New York.”

“Oh, well, then by all means let’s go there. That is, if it’s safe.”

“Of course it’s safe. Either it’s safe or it isn’t. They tell me the local boys approve of this place, that is, they sanction it, allow it to exist and do business, because they figure there has to be one place as a sort of hangout for members of the Chicago mobs. There’s only one real danger.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, if the Chicago mobs start shooting among themselves. So far that hasn’t happened, and I don’t imagine it will. You’ll see why.”

They walked down Broadway a few blocks and then turned and walked east. When they came to a highly polished brass sign which advertised a wigmaker, Jimmy steered Isabel into the narrow doorway, back a few steps and rang for the elevator. It grinded its way down, and a sick-eyed little Negro with a uniform cap opened the door. They got in and Jimmy said: “Sixth Avenue Club.”

“Yessa,” said the Negro. The elevator rose two stories and stopped. They got out and were standing then right in front of a steel door, painted red, and with a tiny door cut out in the middle. Jimmy rang the bell and a face appeared in the tiny door.

“Yes, sir,” said the face. “What was the name again?”

“You’re new or you’d know me,” said Jimmy.

“Yes, sir, and what was the name again?”

“Malloy, for Christ’s sake.”

“And what was the address, Mr. Malloy?”

“Oh, nuts. Tell Luke Mr. Malloy is here.”

There was a sound of chains and locks, and the door was opened. The waiter stood behind the door. “Have to be careful who we let in, sir. You know how it is.”

It was a room with a high ceiling, a fairly long bar on one side, and in the corner on the other side was a food bar, filled with really good free lunch and with obviously expensive kitchen equipment behind the bar. Jimmy steered Isabel to the bar.

“Hello, Luke,” he said.

“Howdy do, sir,” said Luke, a huge man with a misleading pleasant face, not unlike Babe Ruth’s.

“Have a whiskey sour, darling. Luke mixes the best whiskey sours you’ve ever had.”

“I think I want a Planter’s punch—all right, a whiskey sour.”

“Yours, sir?”

“Scotch and soda, please.”

Isabel looked around. The usual old rascal looking into a schooner of beer and the usual phony club license hung above the bar mirror. Many bottles, including a bottle of Rock and Rye, another specialty of Luke’s, stood on the back bar. Except for the number and variety of the bottles, and the cleanliness of the bar, it was just like any number (up to 20,000) of speakeasies near to and far from Times Square. Then Isabel saw one little article that disturbed her: an “illuminated” calendar, with a pocket for letters or bills or something, with a picture of a voluptuous dame with nothing on above the waist. The calendar still had not only all the months intact, but also a top sheet with “1931” on it. And across the front of the pocket was the invitation. “When in Chicago Visit D’Agostino’s Italian Cooking Steaks Chops At Your Service Private Dining Rooms,” and the address and the telephone numbers, three of them.

By the time she had studied the calendar and understood the significance of it—what with Jimmy’s advance description of the speakeasy—their drinks were served, and she began to lose the feeling that the people in the speakeasy were staring at her back. She looked around, and no one was staring at her. The place was less than half full. At one table there was a party of seven, four men and three women. One of the women was outstandingly pretty, was not a whore, was not the kind of blonde that is cast for gangster’s moll in the movies, and was not anything but a very good-looking girl, with a very nice shy smile. Isabel could imagine knowing her, and then she suddenly realized why. “Jimmy,” she said, “that girl looks like Caroline English.”

He turned. “Yes, she does.”

“But the other people, I’ve seen much worse at Coney Island, or even better places than that. You wouldn’t invent a story just to make an ordinary little place seem attractive, would you?”

“In the first place, no, and in the second place, no. In the first place I couldn’t be bothered. In the second place I wouldn’t have to. People like you make me mad, I mean people like you, people whose families have money and send them to good schools and belong to country clubs and have good cars—the upper crust, the swells. You come to a place like this and you expect to see a Warner Brothers movie, one of those gangster pictures full of old worn-out comedians and heavies that haven’t had a job since the two-reel Keystone Comedies. You expect to see shooting the minute you go slumming—”

“I beg your pardon, but why are you talking about you people, you people, your kind of people, people like you.
You
belong to a country club, you went to good schools and your family at least
had
money—”

“I want to tell you something about myself that will help to explain a lot of things about me. You might as well hear it now. First of all, I am a Mick. I wear Brooks clothes and I don’t eat salad with a spoon and I probably could play five-goal polo in two years, but I am a Mick. Still a Mick. Now it’s taken me a little time to find this out, but I have at last discovered that there are not two kinds of Irishmen. There’s only one kind. I’ve studied enough pictures and known enough Irishmen personally to find that out.”

“What do you mean, studied enough pictures?”

“I mean this, I’ve looked at dozens of pictures of the best Irish families at the Dublin Horse Show and places like that, and I’ve put my finger over their clothes and pretended I was looking at a Knights of Columbus picnic—and by God you can’t tell the difference.”

“Well, why should you? They’re all Irish.”

“Ah, that’s exactly my point. Or at least we’re getting to it. So, a while ago you say I look like James Cagney—”

“Not look like him. Remind me of him.”

“Well, there’s a faint resemblance, I happen to know, because I have a brother who looks enough like Cagney to be his brother. Well, Cagney is a Mick, without any pretense of being anything else, and he is America’s ideal gangster. America, being a non-Irish, anti-Catholic country, has its own idea of what a real gangster looks like, and along comes a young Mick who looks like my brother, and he fills the bill. He is the typical gangster.”

“Well, I don’t see what you prove by that. I think—”

“I didn’t prove anything yet. Here’s the big point. You know about the Society of the Cincinnati? You’ve heard about them?”

“Certainly.”

“Well, if I’m not mistaken I could be a member of that Society. Anyway I could be a Son of the Revolution. Which is nice to know sometimes, but for the present purpose I only mention it to show that I’m pretty God damn American, and therefore my brothers and sisters are, and yet we’re not American. We’re Micks, we’re non-assimilable, we Micks. We’ve been here, at least some of my family, since before the Revolution—and we produce the perfect gangster type! At least it’s you American Americans’ idea of a perfect gangster type, and I suppose you’re right. Yes, I guess you are. The first real gangsters in this country were Irish. The Mollie Maguires. Anyway, do you see what I mean by all this non-assimilable stuff?”

“Yes. I suppose I do.”

“All right. Let me go on just a few sticks more. I show a sociological fact, I prove a sociological fact in one respect at least. I suppose I could walk through Grand Central at the same time President Hoover was arriving on a train, and the Secret Service boys wouldn’t collar me on sight as a public enemy. That’s because I dress the way I do, and I dress the way I do because I happen to prefer these clothes to Broadway clothes or Babbitt clothes. Also, I have nice manners because my mother was a lady and manners were important to her, also to my father in a curious way, but when I was learning manners I was at an age when my mother had greater influence on me than my father, so she gets whatever credit is due me for my manners. Sober.

“Well, I am often taken for a Yale man, by Yale men. That pleases me a little, because I like Yale best of all the colleges. There’s another explanation for it, unfortunately. There was a football player at Yale in 1922 and around that time who looks like me and has a name something like mine. That’s not important.”

“No, except that it takes away from your point about producing public enemies, your family. You can’t look like a gangster
and
a typical Yale man.”

“That’s true. I have an answer for that. Let me see. Oh, yes. The people who think I am a Yale man aren’t very observing about people. I’m not making that up as a smart answer. It’s true. In fact, I just thought of something funny.”

“What?”

“Most men who think I’m a Yale man went to Princeton themselves.”

“Oh, come on,” she said. “You just said—”

“All right. I know. Well, that’s not important and I’m only confusing the issue. What I want to say, what I started out to explain was why I said ‘you people, you members of the upper crust,’ and so on, implying that I am not a member of it. Well, I’m
not
a member of it, and now I never will be. If there was any chance of it it disappeared—let me see—two years ago.”

“Why two years ago? You can’t say that. What happened?”

“I starved. Two years ago I went for two days one time without a thing to eat or drink except water, and part of the time without a cigarette. I was living within two blocks of this place, and I didn’t have a job, didn’t have any prospect of one, I couldn’t write to my family, because I’d written a bad check a while before that and I was in very bad at home. I couldn’t borrow from anybody, because I owed everybody money. I’d borrowed from practically everybody I knew even slightly. A dollar here, ten dollars there. I stayed in for two days because I couldn’t face the people on the street. Then the nigger woman that cleaned up and made the beds in this place where I lived, she knew what was happening, and the third morning she came to work she brought me a chicken sandwich. I’ll never forget it. It was on rye bread, and home-cooked chicken, not flat and white, but chunky and more tan than white. It was wrapped in newspaper. She came in and said, ‘Good morning, Mr. Malloy. I brought you a chicken sandwich if you like it.’ That’s all. She didn’t say why she brought it, and then she went out and bought me a container of coffee and pinched a couple of cigarettes—Camels, and I smoke Luckies—from one of the other rooms. She was swell. She knew.”

“I should think she was swell enough for you to call her a colored woman instead of a nigger.”

“Oh, balls!”

“I’m leaving.”

“Go ahead.”

“Just a Mick.”

“See? The first thing you can think of to insult me with. Go on, beat it. Waiter, will you open the door for this lady, please?”

“Aren’t you coming with me?”

“Oh, I guess so. How much, Luke?”

“That’ll be one-twenty,” said Luke, showing, by showing nothing on his face, that he strongly disapproved the whole thing.

Exits like the one Isabel wanted to make are somewhat less difficult to make since the repeal of Prohibition. In those days you had to wait for the waiter to peer through the small door, see that everything was all right, open at least two locks, and hold the door open for you. The most successful flouncing out in indignation is done through swinging doors.

He had to ring for the elevator and wait for it in silence, they had to ride down together in silence, and find a taxi with a driver in it. There were plenty of taxis, but the hackmen were having their usual argument among themselves over the Tacna-Arica award and a fare was apparently the last thing in the world that interested them. However, a cruising taxi appeared and Isabel and Jimmy got in.

“Home?” said Jimmy.

“Yes, please,” said Isabel.

Jimmy began to sing: “. . . How’s your uncle? I haven’t any uncle. I hope he’s fine and dandy too.”

Silence.

“Four years ago this time do you know what was going on?”

“No.”

“The Snyder-Gray trial.”

Silence.

“Remember it?”

“Certainly.”

“What was Mr. Snyder’s first name?”

“Whose?”

“Mister
Sny
-der’s.”

“It wasn’t Mister Snyder. It was Ruth Snyder. Ruth Snyder, and Judd Gray.”

“There was a Mr. Snyder, though. Ah, yes, there was a Mr. Snyder. It was he, dear Isabel, it was he who was assassinated. What was his first name?”

“Oh, how should I know? What do I care what his first name was?”

“Why are you sore at me?”

“Because you humiliated me in public, calling the waiter and asking him to take me to the door, barking at me and saying perfectly vile, vile things.”

“Humiliated you in public,” he said. “Humiliated you in public. And you don’t remember Mr. Snyder’s first name.”

“If you’re going to talk, talk sense. Not that I care whether you talk or not.”

“I’m talking a lot of sense. You’re sore at me because I humiliated you in public. What the hell does that amount to? Humiliated in public. What about the man that Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray knocked off? I’d say he was humiliated in public, plenty. Every newspaper in the country carried his name for days, column after column of humiliation, all kinds of humiliation. And yet you don’t even remember his name. Humiliation my eye.”